The Coastal Thematic Exploitation Platform: a virtual research center for coastal environments

Kurzfassung

ESA's Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP) initiative explores a new concept for EO data exploitation. Instead of downloading the data, users are invited to perform processing remotely. Remote processing is especially interesting in view of the continuous increase of volume of available EO data. Providing processing resources closer to the data avoids classical bottlenecks associated to data processing, storage and especially data transfer capabilities. The TEPs go a step further and provide users with an environment to develop and validate new applications, and to share these applications with other users. Applications can range from simple post-processing (graph generation, statistical filtering...) to complex fusion, extraction or classification algorithms. Sharing applications with other users brings about the benefits of collaborative science, supporting reproducible research, peer-reviewing and collaborative improvement, benchmarking and round-robins. It should also foster the creation of community of thematic users, increase the diffusion of EO data, and promote multi-disciplinary approaches. While on demand remote procesing is not necessarily a new concept, most implementations are either too constrained or require programming against a specific API which is unfamiliar to many EO scientists. In fact there is also a wealth of pre-existing code which would be too complex, expensive or cumbersome to adapt. The solution proposed by the Coastal TEP, in addition to providing general building blocks allows users to provide their own processing software, while making their integration as simple and as efficient as possible, without the need to learn a specific new technology. We will report on the implementation of our solution, and showcase the advantages (such as data locality, parallel computation, etc) of such a solution by running through a typical workflow, such as computing time series of average Sea Surface Temperatures and chlorophyll concentration over a given area of interest, as well as some custom processing examples.